Hi Everybody,
Just my two cents worth.
Subject indicies are very ad hoc wether done by a professional
or not. Schools and Universities have other needs than the
average Joe at the public library.
As a acedemic I prefer full text searches to find relavent material.
Inorder to find something by subject I have to KNOW the subject
catalogues structure to be efficient.
regards
Keith.
so, did anything get done on this matter
on this round of the merry-go-round?
-bowerbird
p.s. nice summary, john...
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j.hagerson said:
We have the classic PG conundrum:
In response to a suggestion to make a change, someone helpfully (sarcasm,
people!) indicates the enormity of the task and asks if the person making
the suggestion is willing to single-handedly implement it or to raise tens
of thousands of dollars to hire one or more professionals to "do it right."
Another responds with a willingness to participate in an aspect of the
solution, but only after someone else gets the ball rolling. Another person
reminds us that Distributed Proofreaders has already collected the data to
provide a partial solution; we only need to create a mechanism to bring
their data over to the "parent" site. Finally, someone pipes up that some
material provided to DP is so rare that the only records of the material
even being created are buried with some defrocked monk who drowned off the
coast of Antigua under mysterious circumstances. And someone else will
contribute yet another dead horse for us to beat.
Come on, people. There is no magic wand to provide a complete instant
solution to this issue. There is also nothing wrong for multiple partial
solutions. If someone is really excited about petunias, let that person
create a petunia page. If the LOC has an official subject category for
petunias (I don't know, Science - Botany - Perennial Plants - North America
- Petunias), then let's link things that way too.
We have Distributed Proofreaders. Do we need Distributed Catalogers? I would
be willing to read a book and tell you what categories would be significant
to me. I am not a professional cataloger, but I have used a library before
and I have some concept of a subject index.
The original post was along the lines of "it would be nice if we could do
this." Yes, lots of things would be nice and not every nice thing deserves
to be done. However, if we fancy ourselves as a library, is not a subject
index part of the catalog?
Let the flames begin.
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